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Lrngorpog
Well, here's Elon himself explaining what he did to be considered a co-founder of Paypal. An alternate history according to Elon Musk He does address the book called The Paypal Wars. Excerpt 1: "First, it is worth saying that there is no significant rivalry or animosity that I'm aware of today between myself and Peter Thiel or Max Levchin. After PayPal was sold to eBay, the three of us co-invested in and serve on the board of Room 9, David Sacks's production company, which released "Thank You for Smoking" and will be making another satire this year on the modern art world. I'm also an investor in Peter's hedge fund, he and I have shared many a meal since I left the CEO role at PayPal, he has stopped by to visit me in LA and he expressed an interest in investing in SpaceX (we are not yet taking any outside investment) when we had dinner last year at the TYFS premiere. The only negativity in recent years was due to a book called The PayPal Wars, '''written by a' sycophantic jackass called Eric Jackson. This guy was one notch above an intern at PayPal in the first few years of the company, but gives the impression he was a key player and privy to all the high level discussions. Eric couldn't find a real publisher, so Peter funded Eric to self-publish the book. Since Eric worships Peter, the outcome was obvious - Peter sounds like Mel Gibson in Braveheart and my role is somewhere between negligible and a bad seed. However, to his credit, Peter didn't realize the book would be as bad as it was and apologized to me personally at a Room 9 board meeting at David Sacks's home in LA."'' Excerpt 2: "As far as who deserves co-founder credit for PayPal, let me throw out a few reasons why it is probably fair to consider me for such (without detracting from Max and Peter's similar status): 1. I came up with the company's main viral growth mechanism, as David Sacks (PayPal Chief Operating Officer until the sale to eBay) plainly stated to the LA Times (ref. 1). There were other growth mechanisms, such as Max's automatic buying system on eBay, where he wrote an auction crawler that offered to buy things on eBay only if you accepted PayPal, but my viral email/incentive mechanism was the primary driver of growth. 2. The business model of charging fees only to heavy sellers and not to buyers or light sellers, while still being able to make a profit, was developed by myself and other X executives. See details below. 3.' A large percentage of the critical executives and other personnel came from X', including: *''Roelof Botha, who did a great job managing the finances and internal cost structure and took PayPal through a very difficult public offering as CFO. Now at Sequoia, Roelof was the partner who funded YouTube.'' *''Amy Rowe Klement, who ran the whole product group at PayPal until 2006.'' *''Julie Anderson Ankenbrandt and Sal Giambanco (still VP of HR at PayPal), who managed to build a huge customer service and fraud investigation group in Omaha, going from nothing to hundreds of personnel in the summer of 2000, when I was still CEO. Without them, PayPal would have melted down in a sea fraud and consumer lawsuits.'' *''Sanjay Bhargava, a former Citibank exec, who figured out the world's first low cost method of authenticating terrestrial bank accounts, which was critical to making the PayPal business model work.'' *''Jeremy Stoppelman, who served as VP of Engineering for PayPal until summer of 2003, went to Harvard Bus School, and then co-founded Yelp.'' 4. When X reached agreement to acquire/merge with Confinity, it had more personnel, more user accounts and a faster growth rate than Confinity (although it should be said that Confinity had more eBay users). Peter Thiel is a smart guy and would never have agreed to merge if X was just some lame Internet bank. Mike Moritz was not some Svengali. 5. I was CEO or Chairman of X/PayPal from Jan of 1999 to Oct 2000, just over half of the combined company's three and a half year existence before we agreed to sell to eBay in June of 2002, and was on the board of directors the entire time. I ran the combined company from April 2000 to Oct 2000 or about seven months. It was during this time that X/PayPal (the company was still called X until 2001) established itself as the leading email payments company through an aggressive viral growth system, figured out its business model, scaled from about 60 employees to several hundred, built the customer service & fraud center, added debit card & money market funds and laid the groundwork for multi-country, multi-currency capability. 6. '''By the time Peter became CEO of X/PayPal at the end of Oct 2000, the PayPal product and business model were largely as you know them today. '''Peter did a great job managing the company, particularly in controlling the level of fraud, for another year and a half until we reached an agreement to sell PayPal to eBay, but neither the business model nor the end product saw major changes over that period. 7. '''When PayPal was sold to eBay, I was the largest shareholder by a significant margin. Nobody gives away shares for free, so this is a reasonably objective indicator of contribution.' ''Taking the above points into account, if: *''Founding the company that constituted half the post-merger equity and more than half the employees of the company that became what is known today as PayPal'' *''Coming up with the business model & main customer growth mechanism'' *''Hiring the people who served as CFO, VP product management, VP engineering, customer service, HR (etc) in the combined company'' *''Running X/PayPal for the formative first half of its existence and being on the board the entire time'' *''Being the largest shareholder when all was said and done are not good tests for deserving co-founder status, then what are good tests?"'' Excerpt 3: "Like a lot of nutty ideas proposed during the bubble, X was forced to scale back its ambitions. Musk chose to focus on a single feature: the ability to make payments via e-mail. In 1999, he merged his company with a venture-backed competitor called Confinity, which had a similar product known as PayPal; the merged company kept the X name, and Musk became CEO. For 10 months, he presided over a heated clash of egos, personalities, and visions. "Elon is obviously really freaking smart," says Levchin, a co-founder of Confinity. However, Levchin adds that working with Musk--which is to say, working for Musk--can be difficult. "He's one of those guys who can be larger than the room," says Levchin. He and Confinity's other co-founder, Peter Thiel, became increasingly frustrated with Musk's penchant for micromanaging, as disagreements over technology and branding festered. In the fall of 2000, Musk went on a two-week trip to meet prospective investors. '''When he returned, he learned that Levchin and Thiel had orchestrated a coup. The board fired Musk, replaced him with Thiel, and renamed the company PayPal.' 'Though Musk admits he was hurt by the coup, he managed to keep his feelings bottled up. "I buried their hatchet," he says, as he pantomimes pulling a blade out of his back. "Life is too short for long-term grudges." '''Of course, it's also true that Levchin and Thiel went on to take PayPal public and make him even richer. But what Musk hasn't gotten over is the fact that the company never became more than a glorified feature, and he still believes that PayPal has the potential to become the world's largest consumer financial services company. "It has 120 million customers, and there's a high trust factor," says Musk. "There's a lot of unleveraged value there." Source: Space Exploration Technologies Corporation Excerpt 4: "Musk served as their first CEO – until he was pushed aside and replaced by one of his co-founders, Peter Thiel. '"There was this sense that I turned the risk valve up too high," Musk says, adding, "I think maybe I have a higher tolerance than most."'' ''Yet that same willingness to play chicken, accelerating even as the edge of the cliff comes into view, paid off for everyone involved with PayPal. As the company's largest stakeholder, Musk said no when eBay offered $400 million in 2001. He said no again when eBay doubled its offer, to $800 million – though it would have meant close to $100 million in Musk's pocket. '''At the end of 2002, PayPal finally accepted an offer of $1.5 billion, but even then Musk argued against the deal.'' "Elon's confidence was extraordinary," says Thiel. "He had more at stake than anyone, and he never wavered." 'Source: 'Elon Musk’s Risky Business – MensJournal.com Perhaps that will answer your question. =)